Kremlin to Buckley, Come In

The following conversations was recorded in the Kremlin by a top-secret U.S. electronic device. A tape of the conversation was leaked to The Crimson by astral White House sources.

KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov: My dear Comrade General Secretary. I regret to inform you of a most serious intelligence lapse.

Konstantin U. Chernenko: What? Did Dobrynin finally defect?

Chebrikov: No, something much more serious. Comrade General One of our top secret moles may now be compromised.

Chernenko: Who is it? The man they call Mr. D?

Chebrikov: You mean Mr. T. sir Not him, luckily for us. But this is almost as bad. The chief of our east coast disinformation campaign. William F. Buckley has gone off, as they say in America, "the deep end."

Chernenko: No, not Buckley!!! He was one of our best.

Chebrikov: Yes, sir the Krem de la Krem. It was he who helped whip up the anti-Soviet paranoia in 1980 to help the election of our friend, Ronald Reagan. It was he who helped fan the fires of extreme anti-communism over the '60s and '70s while the doves in the Democratic Party went soft on our efforts. Were it not for him, and his friends like George Will, we might now have to be talking to the Americans.

Chernenko: I know that, fool, but what was it that he did?

Chebrikov: Well sir, last week in his syndicated column, which hundreds of papers around the country carry, he launched an attack on Derek Bok, the president of that bastion of capitalism, Harvard University.

Chernenko: Oh yes, I remember that guy Back before he took over from Leonid. Yuri had your boys do a check on him Tried to get him to acquiesce in our subversion campaign against Harvard students. It was no problem. We got that Core passed through the Faculty with barely a whimper. So what's going on in Cambridge?

Chebrikov: It seems that another one of our operatives, an alert alumnus of that famous school, whose name I cannot divulge, tried to whip up a little more anti-Communist feeling. He wrote a letter to Bok, very cleverly, criticizing the fact that Harvard had on its Faculty an avowed communist that despicable revanchist, Kautskian John Womack, who has brown-nosed his way to the head of the History Department there.

Chernenko: Oh Womack, not that odious weasel'

Chebrikov: Yes, the weasel himself Well. Bok, like the good capitalist that he is, responded with a lot of that dreck about academic freedom, you know the kind of principle those Americans get all sanctimonious about.

Bok wrote to our agent, "The fact that he is a communist is not, of itself, a matter of concern to us so long as he does not seek to indoctrinate his students. I might add that although most Harvard professors are somewhere in the normal Republican-Democratic range of political viewpoints, we do have some faculty members who fall outside this spectrum, being either libertarians or communists or goodness knows what."

Chernenko: These Americans are crazy! What is this new ideology they call "goodness knows what"? They are always trying to come up with some new political gizmo--luckily for us, we always have old Karl and Vladimir llyich to turn to, Oh well...

Cherbrikov: Comrade, don't fall asleep yet; there is more. Bok also said, "May I also say that all American universities subscribe to the tenets of academic freedom, which clearly embody the right of all professors to entertain any political views they choose so long as they carry out their duties without being subject to interference or prejudice on the part of the institution that hires them."

Chernenko: That Bok! That is the kind of capitalist reasonableness that will delay the Revolution in that country for an epoch. So what did Buckley then write?

Chebrikov: Well that clumsy fool took the bait, and he started an anti-Bok campaign, blasting the president for allowing, nay, even rejoicing in the fact that this man Womack was on the Harvard faculty. Buckley took that liberal goo-goo and his fuddy-duddy academic freedom to task, but as he is so accustomed to do he went too far.

"There is no such thing as a Nazi who is also qualified to teach in a community of scholars. Nor is there such a thing as a communist qualified to teach in a community of scholars," Buckley wrote. "The only thing more anaesthetizing to moral sensibilities than to have a communist on a faculty of a college is to have as its president someone who can not penetrate that distinction."

Chernenko: Oh Chebbie, we should sign that man up for Kremlin speech-writing; he has such a catchy turn of the phrase. But what a dumkopf! Doesn't Buckley know that that kind of posturing only caters to the peaceniks and the detentists? I can already hear the shrieking in the halls of Harvard, about blacklisting and freedom of speech and all that other liberal clap-trap.

Chebrikov: Oh yes I know sir, the liberal press will be able to use this, just as it was able to use Reagan's "evil empire" speech to foment unease among the moderates and people who want to talk with us. Did you notice, something may even be wrong with Reagan?

Chernenko: What do you mean, Viktor?

Chebrikov: Well, I stress I am now only speculating, but we think the American CIA has now started to suspect our disinformation techniques, and they are responding tit for tat. Did you hear what Reagan said "off the record" before his radio broadcast on Saturday: "My fellow Americans. I am pleased to announce I just signed legislation banning Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." Can you imagine the field day the arms controllers are going to have. We could well have to go back to Geneva!

Chernenko: Well, it looks like you guys have really screwed this one up. What are you going to do about it, or did I hear you say you like Siberia in the summertime?

Chebrikov: No, nothing of the sort! We are going to have to live with Womack for a while: he is scheduled to remain chairman of Harvard's History department for one more year. Our only danger is that our chief moles at Harvard, the Republican Club, will froth like they did last year when they attacked Womack and that wimpy liberal Stanley Hoffman as an example of Harvard's purportedly leftist faculty. That would undoubtedly whip up more liberal sentiment, the kind of goo-goo feeling I don't like to deal with.

Chernenko: Me neither, but, I repeat, what are we going to do about it?

Cherbrikov: Well, if we can't neutralize Womack, then I suggest much more drastic action. We must get that guy, that Polish history teacher...what is his name, oh yes, Pipes, back to Washington as soon as possible. That is our only hope. Otherwise the Revolution is lost in Cambridge. I'll get my boys on it right away.